7 October 2008

Comments now moderated

A visitor left a defamatory comment on this website overnight, which I didn’t notice until this morning. I’m sorry it took that wrong to remove it.

The remarks related to a former work colleague of mine.

I’ve been posting here since July 2003 without needing to hold comments for moderation, but that’s now changed, unfortunately.

I’m not lamenting the loss of bygone innocence. In fact it’s a wonder something like that didn’t happen sooner, when you think about it.

It does shows how easily people’s reputations can be attacked on the web. Not here though.

Tags: blog, internet, reputation
1 comment


3 October 2008

Tumblr and Twitter

Regular readers will know that I like to experiment with different web services. Some I abandon as quickly as I try them.

There are probably dozens of my inactive accounts floating around various parts of the web.

Two that I get enthusiastic about occasionally, forget about, and then return to are Twitter and Tumblr.

The Tumblr account, using its own domain Views in Brief, now has the same theme as this blog.

The difference between Tumblr and a normal blog is meant to be that items are shorter, with more emphasis on pictures, video and links of interest.

Tags: blog, internet, web-2.0
0 comments


31 August 2008

RSS feed restored

I discovered today my RSS feed for this site was down, and it probably has been for a week. That’s because I was messing around with a personal hosted aggregator and foolishly used the feed directory.

It overrode the Feedburner URL and returned an error on the feed address.

I noticed the problem while signing up with Nourish for an email subscription service.

I’ve cancelled the Feedburner email subscription account and transferred the five loyal readers to Nourish. They will now receive a weekly email newsletter, instead of daily. I think that’s a more appropriate frequency for a site like this one.

If you’d like to sign up, use the form in the sidebar or follow this link.

Tags: aggregator, internet
3 comments


28 August 2008

Alexa page rank

Don’t expect to be particularly illuminated if a search result for Alexa page rank brought you here. I simply wanted to make an observation.

From the Alexa site: “Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users and data collected from other, diverse sources over a rolling three-month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews.”

I read a couple of things more than a year ago which made me think the Alexa ranking might be semi-important, especially for a commercial website: Read more »

Tags: internet
0 comments


12 August 2008

Late mail: Gmail was down

Most Gmail users around the globe have commented already on Gmail being down for a few hours.

Apparently Twitter was flooded with Gmail comments and on Google itself the system failure was one of the most searched terms over that period.

For Australians, or me at least, it was only a minor inconvenience. I noticed the problem when I arrived at work about 7.15am and the service was restored within half an hour.

The failure must have been overnight.

Tags: email, google, internet
0 comments


26 July 2008

Traffic surge to 6561 visitors

I thought there was something wrong today when I checked the Google Analytics stats for The Border Watch website.

I’ve been quite pleased with the site’s traffic growth, but wasn’t expecting today’s surge to more than 6500 unique visitors. Read more »

Tags: internet
1 comment


4 July 2008

Identi.ca: Unique or clone?

I was never a big Tweeter, but found the concept strangely compelling. There are many people ranting on the web about service disruptions, but I never used it enough to be troubled.

Nevertheless, I like to try new things and stumbled across Identi.ca yesterday and set up an account with the short, early-adopter user name of mjg.

The service is Open Source and I like the fact I can login with openID. There is the promise of things to come in terms of integration and updates, such as SMS, Facebook and WordPress.

There is a good in-depth discussion here.

Tags: blogs, internet, Technology, web-2.0
0 comments


29 June 2008

rssHugger worth a look

I’m taking a look at rssHugger.

It claims to be a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together.

“rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimisation, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader.

“rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in.

“If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.”

It sounds good in theory. By writing about the service here I become entitled to a free listing for this site. That offer is available to anyone.

As with other such tools I’ll monitor its impact on site traffic with interest.

Tags: internet, Technology
0 comments


25 June 2008

Service disruption

For the first time in about three years I’ve been with Site5 there have been significant service disruptions to my web hosting.

This site and my others have been down for most of the past 48 hours.

Tuesday is usually one of my best for visits on this site, but numbers were down 45 percent his week compared with last week.

Apologies to anyone who was locked out on trying to visit here in the past two days.

Tags: internet
0 comments


21 June 2008

The Border Watch website

I’m putting the finishing touches to a new dynamic website for The Border Watch. It’s my modification of the Revolution News WordPress theme. Read more »

Tags: internet, Kalgoorlie, Mount Gambier, newspapers
0 comments